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Television: AA Gill: Friends, Romans...lend me your pants

Frankly, food on television is a vile disgrace. How can we expect our children to grow up to be, well, grown-ups and responsible viewers of Panorama if we stuff their heads with processed rubbish like Ready Steady Cook, with its genetically modified presenters and battery-farmed format? Most breakfast and lunchtime offerings are fast food, sickeningly clogged with sweet clichés and fatty truisms. What we need is a Jamie Oliver to reorganise the schedules into healthy, organic watching, to get rid of the junk snacks and the quick-fix recipes.

We are producing a generation of kids who think dinner is something you have to do against the clock for money. Then there’s Gordon Ramsay, who makes cooking look like a cross between The Sweeney and Tiswas, and the dozens of sadistic slimming reality shows, sadistic healthy-eating makeovers, and that awful woman who resembles an oven-ready guinea fowl and who humiliatingly confronts